Suquamish, Wash., Artist Combines Ethnic Dynamics of Past With Present Story-Date: 06:23 p.m. PST Sunday , January 10, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------ Suquamish, Wash., Artist Combines Ethnic Dynamics of Past With Present By Cate Montana, Indian Country Today, Rapid City, S.D. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News Jan. 11--SUQUAMISH, Wash.--Listening to Inupiat artist Larry Ahvakana talk about his work, strange images arise of a man seated in front of a white block of marble, sifting through a basket filled with all the materials and images of his culture's past. What does he have to say of his people? What does the stone want to say? Ahvakana turns to the basket and takes out, one by one, a story of Walrus Man, an ulu or woman's knife and a dancer's mask. He examines them carefully. Can he take these things and return them to his people in another form? Can he show them their culture and history in a new way? These things he thinks about. The cold stone waits for his shaping hand ... With three current exhibitions in Seattle, one in Washington D.C., two in Portland and one each in Alaska and Greenland, Ahvakana, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate, is a busy man. His figures and animals carved in ivory, wood, alabaster, sculpted glass, cast bronze, and works in other metals, are in permanent collections at museums and corporations from New York City to Santa Fe to Alaska. With all his success as a professional artist, you'd think Ahvakana would be set -- content with his work, settled in his style. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Nothing about Ahvakana stands still. "Being your own person and finding your own forms, that's a very hard road to go," says the 52-year-old artist from Barrow, Alaska. "I'm still searching and working on things." One of the things he continuously searches for are ways to depict the intricate dynamics of his people's lives, past and present. "When I was little I'd go to dances and ceremony -- they're so visual and so emotional within you. How do I bring that out? How does one bring that out in a static form? "That's very hard. So that's why I dance and try to do work that gives a lot of inter-relationships with form, and try to do some things that are animal and human form together. Like the transformation idea of one's spirit to another, or the use of one's spirit to another. So that's what I'm trying to relate with my work." Whether it's a carved ebony mask of Umialiq -- the Whaling Captain, complete with a fringe of wolverine fur, the beaded, carved wooden figure of "Medicine Man's Travel with Seal," or a grouping of enormous plaster figures in the dance of the Winter Ceremony, Ahvakana's work always bears the stamp of being Inuit. But working with modern rather than traditional materials, mixing stone, wood, cast glass and even neon lights into his individual pieces and exhibits takes Ahvakana's work into an arena that bridges many worlds, cultural, historical, physical and spiritual. "I'm basically working within a multi-cultural environment," Ahvakana says. "That's what we're living in. "I think to expand one's culture is to grow with it. It's not a closed thing anymore. Our culture isn't dead because it's evolving. It may not be the same as before, but nothing is ever the same as before." Before he could evolve his ideas and his culture's art, Ahvakana first had to discover just what that culture was about. Since a lot of the original artwork, masks and carvings, hunting implements and household articles were removed from villages and lost to the culture generations ago, Ahvakana searched museums, collections and books for artifacts that most of his people have never seen. Using the ethnic material as a base, he interprets the object, story, dance or song and incorporates it's essence in a new form. "It's been a growing interplay with the history of my people with my work," he says. "I try to emulate the visual history of the people ... and re animate some of the ideas ... to give it a broader essence within a fine art realm." Ahvakana's current focus is doing more art shows, putting together whole environments rather than spending so much time creating "sales items." In a 1996 show entitled "Romance of the Land: Native Northwest Visions" at the Bellevue Art Museum in Washington, he set up a scene of drummers and dancers cast in plaster, depicting Kivigiq, the Winter Ceremony. The Inupiats had just reestablished the ceremony which included bringing out the box drum, a very sacred item, a three-day dance and a final ceremony calling the spirits and releasing them at the end of the season. "That show was pretty much the start of trying to visualize on a larger scale a ceremonial aspect of my art, incorporating the ceremony of my people which nobody has hardly ever seen, even in Alaska. "I tried to emulate some of the dancers the way they looked physically, incorporating dancers that haven't really ever been seen -- like a dancer coming out of the center hole of a ceremonial house I . So there's a man pushing himself through the floor, and he has a stuffed seal on his head. And other dancers that have different stuffed animal forms on their heads, like a whale, seals, caribou and different animals that have been hunted the past years." Although the logistics of creating, transporting and setting up an art exhibit of that magnitude are complex, and potential sales are fewer than for small pieces, the sculptor says that in some ways, nothing less than a full, thematic exhibit can convey the magnitude of the experiences he wants to show. Contrary to what some people believe, Ahvakana believes it is the artists, the linguists and the dancers, not the tribal administrators who are caretakers of the culture. As people capable of expressing their cultural heritage in the most articulate and compelling terms -- artists have the responsibility for passing their vision on for others to see and understand -especially those within their own nation. "I think our people should look into conceptual ideas or conceptual art as a fleeting impression of what an artist thinks about certain things, environmental or political or whatever," he said. "They (our people) mostly do static shows, selling art. And ... especially Indian artists are there to sell art, to make art that looks like it was made pre-contact. "It's very pretty and very non-political. You put it into a house or building. You look at it and its very nice looking, and then you stop looking at it and move on." With so much homogenizing of native cultural images going on, Ahvakana says that as an artist it is important to stand up and create a personal interpretation of one's culture. But that, he admits, is extremely difficult in the face of that very trend towards homogeneity. Add to that the loss of language, ceremonies and other experiences, and gaining a unique and potent cultural voice is difficult. "When one is taken away from one's culture when you're small, as an artist you have a dramatic struggle to bring out your emotions about it. I think that's one of the things that I'm trying to do, is bring that emotion of culture, the emotion of my people -- bring it out to the forefront." ----- Visit Indian Country Today on the World Wide Web at http://www.indiancountry.com/ (c) 1999, Indian Country Today, Rapid City, S.D. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. ------------------------------------------------------------